Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Read online

  ALSO BY DALE E. BASYE

  Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go

  Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck

  Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck

  Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Dale E. Basye

  Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2012 by Bob Dob

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at randomhouse.com/teachers

  wherethebadkidsgo.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Basye, Dale E.

  Snivel : the fifth circle of Heck / by Dale E. Basye; illustrations by Bob Dob. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eleven-year-old Milton and his older sister Marlo are led by the Grin Reaper to Camp Snivel, the level of Heck for whiners, but manage to escape, only to be caught and taken to the court of Judge Judas to testify at Satan’s trial.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89884-6

  [1. Future life—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Camps—Fiction. 4. Trials—Fiction. 5. Humorous stories.] I. Dob, Bob, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.B2938Sni 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011013610

  Random House Children’s Books supports

  the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO ME.

  NO MATTER HOW MANY OBSTACLES I FACED

  WHEN WRITING THIS BOOK, THERE I WAS,

  EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, TIRELESSLY SUPPORTING

  MY OWN EFFORTS, AS IF ENGAGED IN SOME

  EERIE PSYCHIC DANCE WITH MYSELF,

  AT TIMES EVEN FINISHING MY OWN SENTENCES.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  1. A TRAM-ATIZING EXPERIENCE

  2. GRINNING FROM FEAR TO FEAR

  3. CAMPING THEIR STYLE

  4. HOMICIDAL CHITCHAT

  5. CROSS MY ART TEACHER AND HOPE TO DIE

  6. BAPTISM BY CAMPFIRE

  7. A SHADOW OF HER FORMER SELF

  8. HEADED STRAIGHT FOR THE POE HOUSE

  9. A LAKE AND A PROMISE

  10. MAIDEN THE SHADE

  11. LEND ME YOUR EAR

  12. DROWNING THEIR SORROWS

  13. WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR VOTE

  14. CLUBBED INTO SUBMISSION

  15. INSANITY IS THE FATHER OF INVENTION

  16. A LEVELED PLAYING FIELD

  17. THE ’RENTS MUST BE PAID (A VISIT)

  18. JOKER IN THE PACT

  19. SO FAR, SO GIDDY

  20. UNFAIR GAME

  MIDDLEWORD

  21. NEAR-LIFE EXPERIENCE

  22. PRESSED TO PLAY

  23. A SIGHT FOR SOARING EYES

  24. A CASE OF TRIAL AND TERROR

  25. THE TRAGIC TOUCH

  26. EAR-RATIONAL BEHAVIOR

  27. SING FOR YOUR STUPOR

  28. SCENTS AND SENSE-ABILITY

  29. WHIFF OR LOSE

  30. TOSSED INTO THE NOSH PIT

  31. LOOK BEFORE YOU WEEP

  32. ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKUP

  33. TAKING LEAVE WITH THEIR SENSES

  34. CREEPSHOW FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

  35. DIE LAUGHING

  36. THE LAST RESORT

  37. THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE PROCESS

  38. BEAR WITNESS

  39. FAILING THE PROTEST

  40. COURTING DISASTER

  41. JUSTICE IS SERVED COLD

  BACKWORD

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.

  One of these places is as dreary, damp, and despairing as spending your birthday at school taking a standardized algebra test in soggy swim trunks using a number 2 pencil: made of real number 2.

  It’s a place filled with more blubbering than a pod of whimpering whales; as cheerless as a cheerleader with laryngitis; and as listless as, well, someone who lost their list of favorite things (you know, raindrops on neuroses, blisters on kittens, etc.).

  There is a tired old expression usually uttered by people wearing tired old expressions: “Misery loves company.” The meaning? No, it doesn’t necessarily suggest that working for a company will make you miserable (good guess, though). What it really means is that misery likes to throw one heck of a pity party: an invitation-only affair where the downhearted rub slumped shoulders with one another until their gloom is spread as evenly as Feelin’ Blueberry jam on wet toast that invariably falls facedown on the floor. Think of it as a disconsolate disco, with all those feet stomping on gripes until they make a truly fine whine.

  And in this place—the fifth of Heck’s dispiriting circles—the miserable have nothing if not each other: a camp of complaint that is going down, down, down.…

  The mysterious Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including—but not limited to—the Powers That Be Evil) have stitched this and countless other subjective realities together into a sprawling quilt of space and time.

  Some of these quantum patches may not even seem like places. But they are all around you and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity, at least for a little while.

  So please return your postures to their fully downright positions and extinguish all hope. We’re in for a bumpy landing.…

  MILTON FAUSTER-ELEVEN years old at the time of his untimely death—looked outside past the marble balcony jutting over the crater, stunned as he took in the dreary spectacle of Snivel. The sky was a deep, impenetrable gray. Hanging from the cloud cover was a gargantuan, pendulous glass enclosure that, Milton rightly assumed, was Camp Snivel. It was like a big teardrop, he thought, crying from the sky.

  Through the camp’s glass shell, at the teardrop’s widest point, Milton could make out what looked like a capsized lake hanging, somehow, upside down. Above the upturned lake—or below, depending—where the camp was suspended from the clouds, Snivel narrowed to a stem.

  “Must be an optical delusion,” said Marlo, Milton’s impulse-control-challenged older sister, as she blew a wayward strand of blue hair from her face. “Like how people dressed in the eighties.”

  More children—a slack-jawed boy, a long-faced girl, and a skinny Emo boy with a scraggly bob hairstyle—joined Milton and Marlo on the balcony of the Moanastery: a crumbling cloister where the Brothers of the Unconsolably Morose, Miserable, and Exceedingly Rueful (also known as BUMMER) practiced their peculiar penitence.

  “Speaking of optical delusions,” Marlo said as a pair of twins—an Asian girl and her sleeping brother physically joined at the shoulder and hip—stepped onto the roughly hewn balcony.

  “They’re Siamese twi
ns,” Milton clarified. “Not delusions.”

  “Actually, we prefer conjoined,” the girl said with a look of mock reproach before revealing a mouthful of perfect teeth. The two siblings couldn’t seem more different, Milton thought. The girl was fresh-faced and alert while the thick-featured boy frowned and grumbled in his sleep.

  “Sorry, I didn’t …,” Milton replied, a little dazed by the girl’s smile. “I mean … you’re pretty. Um … unique. Pretty unique.”

  Below the Moanastery was a massive crater piled high with millions of tons of reeking garbage, fed into the yawning basin through widemouthed discharge pipes. Waves of stench rippled in the fetid air as the decomposing mound exhaled its exceedingly foul breath.

  “What is that smell?!” whined a pouting, scowling girl with freckles spattered across her cheeks. “It’s like a family of skunks that choked to death on stinkbugs!”

  “Down below you is the Dumps,” Abbot Costello, a ruddy-faced monk wearing a steel-wool robe, explained wearily as he sulked out onto the balcony. “Are any of you familiar with the River Styx?”

  Milton and Marlo shuddered in unison, recalling their own vivid memories of traversing the great tunnel of dung—the River Styx, the final, fecal resting place of all the world’s sewage.

  “Well, much like how the River Styx shuttles all that … stuff from the Surface down to h-e-double-hockey-sticks,” the abbot continued while casually flagellating himself with a small leather lash, “the Dumps is where the world’s detritus goes to decompose and demoralize.…”

  Wails of anguish reverberated throughout the crater. Milton and Marlo clapped their hands over their ears at the tormented din and turned. Inside the Moanastery, a group of monks moaned into coiled brass funnels trained outward into the abyss beyond.

  “AH!” Abbot Costello shouted over the roar of amplified sobs and rushing wind echoing throughout the crater. “OUR FREQUENT FRIAR MILES RETURNS TO FERRY YOU ACROSS THE SEA OF SIGHS TO SNIVEL: THE CIRCLE OF HECK FOR WHINY, MOPEY CRYBABIES LIKE YOURSELVES!”

  The wind had upturned layers of fresh, rotting garbage. Through the swirls of trash, Milton could see a rusty tram approaching, wobbling on a pair of cables suspended from the distended midsection of Snivel to the Moanastery.

  “Snivel is … upside down?” said a gangly boy with an elfish face, flaming red ears, and a runny nose as he arrived onto the balcony. “But how—”

  “You will have the opportunity to see for yourself!” the abbot yelled as the caged gondola arrived at the balcony. Out hopped a monk with sunken blue eyes, a ginger beard, and a broken nose.

  “All aboard the ThighTram!” Friar Miles called out, gesturing to the children.

  “The ThighTram?” Marlo mumbled as she and the other children were herded into the cramped, swaying cage. “This better not have anything to do with exercising …”

  “No, not ThighTram … ThighTram,” the friar lisped as he tossed a roll of duct tape to the sniffling red-eared boy. “You’d better tape yourthelves in, my children. The Thea of Thighs is ethpecially thtormy today.”

  Friar Miles sat in the front of the tram behind a controller handle, air pressure gauge, and hand-brake wheel. “Oh bother, that art tho heavy, woeful be thy name,” he murmured softly to himself before turning the handle. The SighTram lurched forward up the cable, reeling and rocking like a middle-aged mom with her iPod up too loud. The conjoined twin boy stirred awake on his sister’s shoulder.

  “What’s going on, Sara?” he asked with a groggy, accusatory whine as he took in his surroundings. “Why are we—” he shrieked, his dark, almond eyes bugging out when he saw the Dumps beneath the rusty cage floor, before passing out.

  “Narcolepsy,” the girl explained to Milton as she clutched the tram’s flimsy mesh-wire side. “Brought on by strong emotions—”

  “Like the terror of realizing you’re in a cage dangling above a rubbish heap,” interjected Milton, gripping the conversation tight, like a life preserver, as he tried to tamp down his mushrooming fear.

  The girl smiled her disarmingly warm grin.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Like that. Unfortunately, I’m an insomniac and it’s hard for me to sleep through anything.”

  The SighTram lurched forward, straining against the gale-force Sea of Sighs as it squealed painfully slowly toward the gargantuan glass teardrop ahead.

  “Are we there yet?” whined the young Emo boy as he fussed with his designer glasses.

  The tram was buffeted about as if it were a ball of yarn and the powerful gusts were a playful cat, batting the cage back and forth between its paws.

  The slack-jawed boy with the curly hair gaped out the tram’s side.

  “I know that, like, some religious people can be born again, right?” the boy asked no one in particular. “But we can’t, like … die again … right?”

  “Maybe life and death are like a video game,” the elfin boy speculated as he wiped his nose, staring down at the Dumps. “Different levels. Different ways to live and die …”

  Milton leaned over, scooped up his backpack, and unzipped the top. Out poked the fuzzy white head of his pet ferret, Lucky. Milton gave Lucky a quick, reassuring pat.

  “It’s okay, little guy,” Milton whispered out of the side of his mouth. “Just stay cool.”

  Milton caught Sara, the conjoined twin, looking over at him, smiling slyly. She held her finger up to her mouth, the international signal for “your secret is safe with me.”

  The rickety cage was halfway across the swaying span of cable connecting the Moanastery to Camp Snivel.

  Marlo, duct-taped next to Milton on the bench, grabbed the back of Friar Miles’s swiveling chair.

  “Can’t this thing go any faster?!” she shouted as the monk puzzled over his controls. Marlo stared down between her fidgeting feet at the grille floor, with the Dumps—3,000 feet below—all too visible. “Toxic waste is bad for my complexion!”

  Friar Miles slammed his hand against the controller handle, and the SighTram thrust forward. The air pressure gauge hissed, its needle tapping impatiently against the dangerous red end of the dial. The motor’s high-pitched whine cleaved the dull roar of the Sea of Sighs in two.

  Friar Miles struggled with the controller.

  “It’th thtuck,” the pinched-faced monk relayed.

  Friar Miles gave the brake wheel a turn. It twisted off in his hand.

  “Is that bad?” Milton asked, knowing the answer deep down in his roiling gut.

  “Only if we want to thtop,” the monk replied. “There mutht be garbage blocking the brake padth.”

  Friar Miles climbed out of the rocking tram and clambered onto its roof.

  “Uh-oh,” Marlo muttered as she tore herself free from her duct-taped seat belt and took the friar’s seat at the front of the tram. “Look.”

  Up ahead, through a flurry of plastic bottles and disposable diapers, Milton saw the Gates of Snivel fixed behind a landing platform set at the midsection of the massive glass teardrop. And it was rushing toward them at breakneck speed.

  “Now what am I supposed to do?!” Marlo shouted up to the friar, holding the hand brake.

  “Wait until I thay pull.”

  “Thay what?!”

  “PULL!”

  Marlo reflexively yanked the hand brake. The SighTram screamed to a stop a few yards from the landing platform and swung violently forward.

  Friar Miles was pitched into the air and slammed into the Gates of Snivel. Milton—his duct tape giving way—soared out of the flying tram and into the friar.

  “Oooompthh!” the monk yelled as Milton struck him, sending them both rolling into the rusty metal entrance with a clang. The remaining children screamed inside of the tram as the cage swung like a pendulum.

  Milton rubbed his throbbing head as he rose to his feet. The Gates of Snivel swung open and closed with a grating eeee-orrrr creak.

  “Jump when it swings close to the platform!” Milton yelled as the SighTram pitched forward.

>   Marlo clutched the sides of the bench. “No way!” she yelled. “We’ll just stay put until it’s safe!”

  One of the cables fastened above the platform was yanked out of its mooring. The SighTram listed suddenly to the left, now rocking both side to side and to and fro.

  Marlo swallowed.

  “Now’s good, too,” she muttered as she made her way to the back of the tram, turned, and—as the SighTram swung close to the platform—sped down the aisle and leapt out the driver’s window. She landed hard on her shoulder and rolled across the smooth marble platform next to Milton. He trotted to the edge of the platform.

  “The rest of you have got to hurry!” Milton shouted through cupped hands.

  One by one, the children ripped off their duct tape and jumped from the SighTram. Friar Miles padded across the balcony and studied the cable with his sunken blue eyes.

  “Ath dangerouth ath my trip back will undoubtedly be,” he lisped, “the Moanathtery ithn’t anywhere near ath awful ath Thnivel.”

  He sprang to the cable, gripped it tightly, and, swinging hand over hand, worked his way to the SighTram. Friar Miles waved as he backed away across the Sea of Sighs, swallowed up by swirls of upturned foam packing peanuts and spent printing cartridges.

  Milton and Marlo turned to face the Gates of Snivel. The corroded bars featured cast-iron tragedy/tragedy masks and tiny violins welded up and down the rods. When the wind brushed against the violins, their little metal bows scraped against the wire strings, creating a disconcerting concert of jeering screeches. Twined up along the bars were vines flaunting withered, heart-shaped flowers that coiled in a sad clot at the gates’ twin handles: lumpy lead “fists” wiping away a string of opal tears leaking from a pair of eyes wrought in drooping loops. Beyond the gate was a thick curtain of shadows.

  Tired of being pelted with bits of reeking, stinging garbage, Milton tugged open the heavy gate.

  A skeletal hand reached out from the shadows. Bony, knotted fingers gripped Milton’s hand, seizing it tight with what felt like a clench of electric icicles. A devitalizing ache blossomed from the base of Milton’s palm and spread through his body, filling him with a soft, sickening gloom. Milton was paralyzed, his mind like an old television tuned to a dead channel.